Assistant Professor

Ph.D., Medieval Studies, University of Notre Dame

230 LIS
(217) 244-0154
-bmak, at illinois.edu-
http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~bmak/

Areas of Research

The interpenetration of manuscript, print, and digital cultures; the cultural production and circulation of knowledge; palaeography and diplomatics; manuscript studies; book history; medieval and early modern collecting; history of archives and libraries.

Publications include How the Page Matters (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and "On the uses of authenticity," Archivaria (Spring 2012).

Other Professional Appointments

Teaching this Semester

• LIS590HB History of the Book (2013 SP)
• LIS502E Libraries Info and Society [Libraries, Information and Society] (2013 SP)

Research Projects

Implications of a Digital Revolution

Notably absent in the current rush to digitize newspapers and books are critical investigations of the processes and products of this work. Such examinations are forestalled, Mak argues, by a rhetoric of revolution that determines how the phenomenon should be constituted and studied, just as it continues to do for the so-called printing revolution of the fifteenth century. Her analysis of digitizations exposes the ways in which historical sources are being reconfigured for...

How the Page Matters

Mak's book, "How the Page Matters," historicizes recent debates about eBooks and similar technologies by casting the page as an interface that has been under development since the scrolls of Antiquity. "How the Page Matters" tracks the page through the manuscripts of the Middle Ages, the printed books of the early modern period, and onto digital displays. By locating the page in a broader tradition of writing technologies, the book re-examines the print and digital '...

Unpacking the Librarian's Cabinet of Curiosity

For over two millennia, librarians have played a critical role in the production and transmission of knowledge. They have helped to collect, catalogue, and curate a vast range of materials that constitute much of our cultural heritage - from epic poetry on papyrus scrolls to PDFs of scholarly articles. This project interrogates these practices by building a librarian's cabinet of curiosity, and populating it with explicit examples of the mundane activities that occur in...

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